Monday, October 6, 2014

I Laugh at your Paywall (usually)

If you are moderately interested in technical things, your internet
research will at some point end at a paywall:
technical paper unreadable without paying a for-profit publisher's ransom.

This is wrong. Here's how to get around it. Note authors have a moral
right to distribute "offprints" to interested parties, which includes
you! Authors WANT you to read their papers, and they often make a copy
avilable at their home institution or as a technical report.

I naturally would never want to encourage illegality, but "pirating" my papers does nothing to harm me as an author and much to help me.

My experience with this is pretty much limited to the engineering and
computer science literature; for biomed this may not work as well. For
physics, it's almost certainly on arxiv.org
so you don't even need this.

Here's how you find unpaywalled versions of technical papers. First,
you need the title and author names.

Use a search engine specializing in technical publications. My
favorite is CiteSeer, but there is also Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search.
Almost ALWAYS this will lead to a downloadable copy! Start
with the full title of the paper. Often this may not have
discriminating keywords, so try the author names and/or any "advanced
search." If this fails, try plain old Google on the authors & titles.

This just in, but it works for me even on some tough biomed references:
gen.lib.rus.ec. Seems to be some kind of Russian paper mirror. If you search by DOI, click on the numerical link in the search results to get full text(!).

In the rare cases the above fails, look up the author's
institution. If you can find the author's home page, you will
typically find a list of papers, usually with links to PDFs. (Some
schools like MIT are super awesome in that they preserve a student's
web sites for posterity. For example, here's the web page of Brian
Whitman http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~bwhitman/. Here's mine.

If the above fails, consider side channels. Is the author at a
company? Track down patents or patent applications assigned to that
company, most companies only let you publish after a patent is applied
for, and patents are public. Is the author an academic? Sometimes
papers are listed by academic research group or department, or
sometimes as "technical reports" which are just preprints in a
different cover.

Completely SOL? No problem, email the author with a polite request:
They will be pleased by your attention and will reply
with a PDF.